I am a chocoholic. There, I have
admitted it. From the rich, grainy purity of Green
& Black’s seventy per cent cocoa solid to the waxy thinness of
chocolate-flavoured cake covering, nothing can expect to live longer than
its best before date in my house when phenylalanine-withdrawal
starts to kick in.

The problem can be traced, like so
many other things, to my childhood, when, after tea, my grandfather used
to produce a ‘two by six’ from the larder. This chocolate
treat was never the same, and my early milk-toothed memories are populated
by Starbars, Doubledeckers, Bountys, Cabanas, Milky
Ways, Marathons, Mars bars… the list, as I run my tongue ruefully around
my now mercury-filled mouth, is seemingly endless. But oh, chunky milk
chocolate dissolving into sugary pools, its creamy sludge sliding warmly
down the throat, has to be one of the best experiences in the world.

One senses that Joël Glenn Brenner,
author of The Chocolate Wars, Inside the Secret Worlds of Mars and Hershey,
has the same lickerish attitude to chocolate. Her description of the chocolate
experience is dithyrambic; her narrative chockful of interesting nuggets
of information which are as satisfying as the M&Ms Mars employees regularly
graze on in their office in Maclean, Virginia. Did you know, it takes three
days and nights to make the chocolate smooth in a Hershey
bar, that chocolate contains 1200 chemicals, one of which smells of rotting
fish, and that the floors in the Mars
factory at Hackettstown, New Jersey are washed every 45 minutes?

Brenner likens herself to Charlie
Bucket, the hero of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, standing outside Willy Wonka’s factory
gates sniffing the sweet chocolate aroma that hangs over the mysterious
factory, longing to go inside and see what it was really like.

Her Golden Ticket into the furtive
world of the chocolate maker came in the form of a routine assignment she
was given by the Washington Post: to find out Mars, Inc.’s reaction to
the news that Hershey had become the number one candy maker in the United
States.

For over a year she pestered Mars
until, finally in 1990, the family, which is estimated to be the third
richest in the world, relented and gave her full access to the company’s
global operations. Two years later they wished they hadn’t; for Brenner
wrote candidly about an intensely secretive family and a patriarch who
most certainly wasn’t as sweet as the bars he created. The family never
forgave her and they haven’t spoken to a single journalist since.

The late Forrest
Mars cut a Napoleonic figure. A brilliant strategist, he founded Mars
Inc. in 1922, and through hard work, a steely deter-mination, and an idiosyncratic
set of management philosophies, built a business that is now worth $13
billion. He relinquished control in 1973 but not before his paroxyms had
instilled fear into the heart of every Mars ‘associate’ - as the company
prefers to call its workers. One manager recalls being called out of bed
in the early hours of the morning to have Forrest rant down the phone at
him because part of the m was missing on some of the M&Ms he had bought.
He wanted the manager to track down the serial number and recall the batch.
When the hapless employee said he couldn’t do it at 3am, Forrest said that
if he didn’t go down to the plant that instant he would be fired. The manager
quickly got dressed.

The fanatical desire for perfection
extended to Forrest’s attitude towards his, frankly, non-descript heirs
- Forrest Jnr., John and Jackie - whom he left to sink or swim back in
1973. As children Forrest would interrogate them every dinner-time about
their school work, their friends, their hobbies; demanding excellence in
everything they did. The children found the grilling such torture that
none of them can now sit down to a meal, hence the sparse eating facilities
at their head office. Indeed, the family’s foibles define the business
today. Mars does not make chocolate bars with peanut butter. Why? Because
the children were raised in England where, Brenner sweepingly asserts,
peanut butter is , apparently, ‘despised’. The Mars siblings prefer hazelnuts
and have constantly pushed the testing of hazelnut-based products over
peanut butter ones, despite the fact that peanut butter chocolate always
outsells hazelnut chocolate in the States. It is one reason why Hershey
is winning the chocolate war.

Whilst taking the silver wraps off
Mars, Inc., Brenner discovered a quietly forgotten fact: that the other
M in M&Ms
stands for Murrie, as in R. Bruce Murrie, the son of William Murrie - the
unsung President of Hershey Chocolate Company, and Milton Hersey’s best
friend. How could it be that Mars and Hershey, now litigious enemies, had
once collaborated to create Mars’s most popular product? The answer harked
back to a bygone age before the candy kings, as insiders call these behemoths,
worried about marketing plans, production technology, shelf space and take-overs;
an age when Willy Wonka, in the form of the dapper Milton Hershey, really
did exist.

Hershey does not have the same cultural
resonance in Britain as Mars. We have been raised on the extra-sweet caramel
chocolate of the bars I recalled earlier. We simply don’t like the sour
taste of the Hershey bar; and therein lies the rub for the quintessentially
American chocolate-maker: the company has singularly failed to market its
product in Europe.

Hershey was the first man to make
milk chocolate in the US and achieved mythical status because of it. Unwrapping
the distinctive purple wrapper of a Hershey bar, and biting your way around
the word Hershey to leave the letters S-H-E has been become one of the
definitive moments of the American childhood.

It took many years of experimenting
for Hershey to create his special ‘off-note’ chocolate – his European detractors
say it was a result of using a batch of of powered milk that was spoiling
– but when he perfected it, he revolutionised the industry, bringing a
luxury commodity to the masses. And that’s where Hershey’s passion lay,
with dreaming up grandiose schemes and trying to make them work. Some did,
some didn’t.

The Victory Whip was an ice-cream
which did not use cream; it sold for six months until pressure from Pennsylvania’s
10,000 dairy farms took it off the market. Chocolate soap, however, was
not a success. People were put off by the strong chocolate odour and its
similar appearance to a Hershey bar.

But, unlike Mars,
Hershey was not into empire building, and massive sales were not the point.
Invention was a means to create his dream of an industrial utopia for his
workers. In 1902 he bought a plot of land in Pennsylvania and set about
designing a town where each house had plumbing and electricity, and where
every worker could enjoy the finest schools, transportation system, swimming
pools, parks, gymnasiums and theatres. In 1906 the town of Hershey was
complete but Hershey’s philanthropy
didn’t end there. A few years later he set up a trust fund for poor, orphaned
boys to give them the security, stability and education he lacked as a
boy. When his beloved wife Kitty died in 1918, Hershey bequeathed his entire
estate, valued at $60 million, to the school. Today his gift is now worth
$5 billion making the school – which is now home to 1,000 boys and girls
from poor inner-city neighbourhoods - one of the richest private schools
in America, and the largest shareholder in Hershey.

Will Hershey retain its candy king
crown for long? Nobody’s sure. What is for certain though is that Mars
and Hershey will remain at the top of the candy rack. Together the two
companies control 75 per cent of the market, making eight out of ten bars
on sale in the States today. It’s a sobering thought, and one that surely
neither man could have dreamed of when they first started experimenting
with their condensing kettles and bags of sugar.

It was halfway through reading The
Chocolate Wars that the glossy dustcover came off in my hands to reveal
a brown hardback cover. Instantly I was reminded of a square of chocolate.
How fitting, I thought, that Brenner’s well-written and engrossing book
should look and taste like a slab of good milk chocolate – rich, substantial
and utterly moreish – yet, thankfully, a whole lot kinder on the teeth.